Al Gore got a lot of mileage out of likening the slow accretion of anthropogenic climate change to a frog in cold water that was gradually being heated to boiling point. He contended that, just as the frogs were lulled by the gradual heat to be the point at which they’d fail to react when the heat became deadly, so too were we humans going to allow our planet slowly to boil us to death.

Except that everything Al Gore said was untrue. First of all, there’s increasing evidence that anthropogenic global warming doesn’t exist. Climate change definitely exists, and always has. Sadly for Gore’s inflated sense of self, though, the earth’s climate does not bend to human will. Humans are capable of polluting their environment, something that they’ve done since time immemorial, but the evidence for them changing the climate doesn’t add up. Second of all, frogs do not allow themselves to be slow-boiled.

Unlike the earth’s climate, humans have direct responsibility for economic changes. In America, the tension is between free markets and a government-managed economy. At the federal level, voters opted for government-management. At the local level, it was a mixed bag. As a resident of California, I can tell you that a government-managed economy, especially one further tainted by union favoritism, is a recipe for economic disaster. In California, we are the frogs in the hot pot.

Here’s the question: will we humans react like real frogs and try to escape from the government-managed economic mess we’ve created, or will we go Gore and sit there was we boil to death?

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Some will sit and some won’t. In some ways our situation is analogous to that of German Jews in the early 1930s. There were all sorts of ominous portents then, but most Jews reasoned that they could ride out their country’s rising anti-Semitism. After all, it was like malaria, a disease that flared up from time to time. Only this time, in the world’s most advanced, educated, and cultured nation, people would not take their Jew hatred much past ranting and gesturing.

I run into similar reasoning on other conservative blogs where there is always somebody to remind us that, “America has been through worse before and came out well.” They’ll cite the Civil War and World War II as examples, totally missing the point that on both occasions Americans fought fiercely to resist the existential threat to our nation. Who’s waging such a struggle right now against renascent Marxism and thuggism, movements that are open and deliberate about their desire to wreck this country? The Supreme Court? John Boehner? The GOP? Frog kings all.

For those of us who don’t want to sit still, where do we go? Where is an America we can flee to or that will ride to our rescue?

Spartacus

The problem is pizza delivery.

So long as we have the ability to pick up a palm-sized device made on the other side of the world (this is “I, Pencil” on steroids, or perhaps “iPencil” if you prefer), automatically link into a fantastically complex and nearly flawless radio network, talk to some guy ten miiles away whom we’ve never met, say “sausage, onion, and mushroom,” rattle off a 16-digit number as proof of our bona fides, and have some other guy show up on our doorstep 27 minutes later with a hot and fresh culinary wonder that would have astounded millennia of our ancestors who subsisted on gruel from an unsterilized little dish… we are in golden handcuffs.

Everything is still too easy and too comfortable for most people to have the ability or motivation to make the leap of imagination that liberty and prosperity are not immutable characteristics of this geographical space we call the USA in the same way that salinity is an immutable characteristic of the ocean. The business of keeping up with everyday life combined with a varying amount of denial will keep most people from spending too much time thinking about the dark path we’re on until it gets very dark indeed.

That said, we are a nation of about 1/3 who believe in liberty and traditional American values; 1/3 who believe in womb-to-tomb state control; and 1/3 who, as Lady Thtcher put it, “don’t know what they believe.” Now, 1/3 of over 300 million is over 100 million geniune conservatives, and that is a force which is absolutely unstoppable… if only we can unify and figure out what it is that we’re trying to do…

SADIE

Charles Martel..and I thought it was just me that was overly paranoid. 1930’s Gypsies and Jews – 2010’s they’re going for the majority…white males, married couples of the one of each gender type, dependents vs independence.

“Citing” you said, well speaking of the devil, in Texas of all places.

As recently as January of this year, the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative included a lesson plan that depicted the Boston Tea Party, an event that helped ignite the American Revolution, as an act of terrorism.

TheBlaze reports that in a lesson promoted on the TESCCC site as recently as January, a world history/social studies class plan depicted the Boston Tea Party as being anything but patriotic, causing many people to become upset with the lack of transparency and review for lessons.

Spartacus, the “thirds” are more akin to the three monkeys: Clueless-could care less, Gimme and “I was for it before I was against” politcian. It’s so damn reminiscent of Russia when they stood in line for hours waiting to buy a pair of shoes. “Can I help you?” Da, I vont shoes. “Would you like the brown shoes or the brown shoes.”

Beth

We lived in Seoul for two years (third child born there) while my husband was stationed near the dmz. I knew I was in for the learning of my life when by the 3rd day, the compound was ‘under attack’ by the students from the university next door; I had to figure out how to get the groceries AND the children up to the fifteenth floor when the elevator was out; the car broke down in a neighborhood with nary a child around to translate. It was the absolute basics of day-to-day living that I had to figure out. I truly grew up in Korea and am thankful everyday for the challenge. We know how to take care of ourselves here. It has been my goal to train up my children to take care of themselves, come what may.

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